The opportunity of gamification
What is gamification?
Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game context to engage users in solving problems. However the terms shouldn’t be taken too literal; it is not about actually playing games. Rather it is about combining the principles of games that make them so attractive, namely challenge, sense of purpose, and rewards, with elements that show the level of performance, such as rankings, badges, and leaderboards.

Gamification is about engaging your customers, employees, or any other community of interest. It does so by working on the intrinsic motivation of people; even if a task isn’t motivating by itself, reaching the goal of the game is motivating.

Potential benefits
Gamification is all about increased engagement, whether it is your customers, employees, or any other community of interest. By engaging people you motivate them to change behaviors. That it is successful is shown by the figure that the top 20% of major firm in terms of engagement, on average have a revenue growth that is 250% higher than their competitors. It can increase employee satisfaction, innovation, skills development, and even change behaviors of employees. However we will look into what it can do for our firm to engage more customers and to keep the current ones satisfied and loyal. * First of all, gamification allows for collection of customer data. Most platforms require users to log in and create an account. As a result each player will be connected to clicks, achievements, etc., which all create big data. This will give us valuable customer insights, which we can use to satisfy our customers better. * By having customers participate on your website, gamification can lead to crowdsourcing if we use this customer feedback from the games. For example, Volkswagen Group invited its customers in China to develop new versions of the ‘people’s car’. Participants of this competition were given tools to easily design the vehicle, and the general public could vote and see from the leaderboard which design was winning so far. This crowd-sourcing campaign received more than 50,000 ideas, and 33 million people visited the website. Clearly, with this type of crowd sourcing we can engage with more customers. * Gamification is a very strong and creative tool to educate your consumers. For example when launching a new product, we could let users test our product in the form of a game, in which the game will give them assignments for which they can earn points, and by doing them our costumers will get familiar with the new product. * Furthermore it helps you stay relevant with your customers. By regularly posting content, customers will keep on visiting your website, and thus stay on top of mind. In other words, gamification can drive loyalty.

Implementation
Last year Garner predicted that 80% of the current gamified applications would fail due to poor design. Probably the majority of that 80%, only implemented gamification because it’s currently hype. In doing so, companies might miss the point and focus on secondary mechanics rather than focusing on their primary product or service. Without clear objectives, gamification can deceive and frustrate customers, or even incentivize them in using your product in the wrong way. Like with any reward design system, you can drive the wrong kind of behavior. For example if we would reward people for making forum posts. This will probably lead to a large number of low quality posts. Just putting up some meaningless badges and points isn’t going to work, we will need to look for a careful design in which our customers will be engaged with meaningful incentives. In order to not belong to that 80%, hereby some steps for implementation:

Goals identification
To start, we will first need to clearly identify our business objectives. When we then find an opportunity to use gamification, we must critically analyze the suitability of gamification to achieve our objectives. If we find that gamification indeed aligns with our goals, we continue with the design of the game.

Design
The key to successful implementation is to put the players’ interests and targets first, and make the design player-centered. For this we need a good understanding of our players and the context of use. In order to engage the player, the gamified applications should motivate players to achieve their goals, and by doing so, achieve the organizational goals. However one must note that this is really a consequence, therefore it is about knowing where the goals of the player and the company overlap. We need to fully understand our player, know what its goals are and what its intrinsic motivation is.

Seven elements are especially important in the design (but not all need to be included): 1. Status. Players are motivated by recognition, and thus game mechanics should make sure the reputation of the player can be boosted. For example on Tripadvisor, people can rate your review. 2. Milestones. Something that has been used for decades, think of air miles, is incremental levels or accomplishments. 3. Competition 4. Rankings. By comparing progress with other participants, this can boost performance, like with competition. 5. Social connectedness. By creating a strong sense of community, more people will join, simply because ‘everybody is playing it’. 6. Immersion reality 7. Personalization. Customization creates a sense of ownership through self-expression.

Besides these elements, in the design it is important to keep scoring easy and the rules simple. Difficulty should gradually increase to keep it challenging, because if the level is too easy or too difficult people will stop playing. In the beginning players should be able to link their actions to a score immediately, to be able to understand what they need to do to be successful.

Let’s play!
After a careful design process, we should test with a small pilot group, before we launch it to all of our customers.

Conclusion
In short I truly believe gamification provides our company with many opportunities. It can make activities playful, and create a connection between our customers and us. Engagement with the customer provides us with a lot of feedback, which we can use for further improvement of our product and services. Furthermore engagement likely improves loyalty. What I think is extremely important, is finding a game mechanism that provides a true benefit to our customer. I would like to illustrate this with Dropbox’s tactic; user can get started by completing tutorial levels and inviting friends, which give them extra space. This profits both the customers and Dropbox itself. I am convinced that if we find out where the objectives of our customer and of our company overlap, and we gamify this, it will lead to long-term benefits for both parties. This game could then attract new customers, and make our current customers more loyal.